Posts Tagged ‘CFO’

A client of ours is a prolific user of metaphor. But those metaphors have proven effective in getting his points across. The most recent one was a description of his role as a sales professional. His first job, as he described it, was to identify his prospect’s wound. His second job was to rub as much salt in it as possible.

Apt. Grisly perhaps, but apt.

Let’s think for a moment about what he’s trying to achieve. From the perspective of marketing and advertising, it’s exactly what we do on a daily basis. Gone are the days of simply saying your product is there and it works. We’ve all developed an immunity to simple fact-bast advertising. Instead, you need to appeal to a client’s target audiences on an emotional level. You need to show them that they have a need. They need your service now in order to prevent something worse from happening that would cost more money down the road.

It works, right? Yes. But who wants to appear as a fear-monger? We don’t. Our clients don’t. So that begs the question of how to expose (and maybe aggravate) a prospect’s needs without being too obvious about it. How to do it a little more…indirectly.

One way is to ask questions. Loaded questions, to be sure.

A tactic that we often take is to first identify the problems our clients’ targets may have. That’s the basis for everything. Since they know their prospects best, they know exactly what frustrates them on a daily basis. They know exactly what keeps them up at night. They also know exactly how their services or products can be solutions for those problems.

Next, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the various people you’re targeting. Think about what is important to the individual executive your message is reaching. A pain that’s top of mind for a CIO, most likely won’t even be on the CEO’s radar screen.

Imagine a scenario where your service could save your prospect significant money, because of a change in how their industry is regulated. The CEO has probably heard about the regulatory change, but only understands how it impacts the highest levels of the organization. The key here is to highlight the CIO’s pain for the CEO and get him thinking about how it could have a great impact on the bottom line. Does he even know about this? Does he know how to ask his employees about it? Perhaps not.

The questions need to be seeded in the CEO’s mind. If the CIO or IT Manager is your actual target audience, wouldn’t the most powerful form of advertising be to have the CEO start asking them about what they’re doing to address x, y or z?